#OndaatjeAudio | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aaknopf · 8 months ago

Text

The novelist Michael Ondaatje has been a poet from the beginning. “Lock,” like other poems in new collection A Year of Last Things, speaks swiftly across time, striking at poetry’s core, where a singular memory flares in the dark and illuminates everything.

Lock

Reading the lines he loves he slips them into a pocket, wishes to die with his clothes full of torn-free stanzas and the telephone numbers of his children in far cities

As if these were all we need and want, not the dog or silver bowl not the brag of career or ownership

Unless they can be used —a bowl to beg with, a howl to scent a friend, as those torn lines remind us how to recall

until we reach that horizon and drop, or rise like a canoe within a lock to search the other half of the river,

where you might see your friends as altered by this altitude as you

The fresh summer grass, the smell of the view— dark water, August paint

How I loved that lock when I saw it all those summers ago, when we arrived out of a storm into its evening light,

and gave a stranger some wine in a tin cup

Even then I wanted to slip into the wet dark rectangle and swim on barefoot to other depths where nothing could be seen that was a further story